


Waiting for Half-Life 3

by Ciretako



Category: Anafabula, Half-Life, Prоspero
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:07:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26490871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ciretako/pseuds/Ciretako
Summary: A tentative series of short stories tying into an upcoming video project. The presently-released installment follows a young mechanical engineer, The Finest Mind of His Generation, as he awakens in an unfamiliar place some time after the events of Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Future installments, if applicable, will feature different stories told from the perspectives of The Director of Research at Kraken Base, The Mystic of Black Mesa, and then finally The Human Consul to Earth.As I choose not to use AO3's archive warning system, note that content warnings apply in the present installment of this series for themes of ontological horror, conspiracy theory and body horror. The story also namedrops an influential cosmic horror author who's known as much for his problematic personal views as he is for his contributions to creative writing, but my hope is for his namedrop to be reflective more of the latter than of the former.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2
Collections: /fanfic/ Collected Works





	Waiting for Half-Life 3

Laszlo wakes.

His last memories are of the earliest stages of what would have been his flight from Sector Seventeen:

His last journey into the Soviet palace that had become his office, now half-buried under an alien alloy designed to be penetrable only by the weapons of the Universal Union, to steal what information he could and to corrupt what information he couldn't.

His march past a guard of peacekeeping operatives - cybernetically augmented, their minds to be found floating halfway between their own wetware and the loaned processing time of a colonial intelligence server cluster, donning powered reactive armor brought to life from blueprints created at Old World R&D blacksites and bearing miniaturised Dark Energy reactors only crudely repurposed by the New World Order into small arms weapon platforms.

His practised expression of indifference as he'd stepped through one of the City's regular movement-monitoring checkpoints, sharing with his office the current edge of a Citadel wall, on his way to his pickup with the Railroad. Then an awakening in an unfamiliar place with only the dimmest sense to be found of even his own mind; of even his own body.

His escape attempt had failed - a surveillance AI had flagged him at the last checkpoint and now he'd been taken unconscious to be questioned for connections with anti-citizen cells known and unknown, metastasising and in remission. He'd been drugged and in all likelihood connected to an alien neuroimaging system as well (his thoughts are coming too slowly, too strangely, for him to not notice), but then this would mean that his interrogation would be able to further Our Benefactors' study of the human nervous system and hasten the obsolescence of the human ancestral form, and of the colonial government's crude system of "host bodies" as well.

To minimise the damage that would be done by him now he would have to watch his thoughts carefully - and his attention being on the suddenly alien nature that has been taken on by his thoughts might just serve to keep him from noticing the suddenly alien nature that has been taken on by his senses as well.

Slowly though, amidst flights of terror and wonder that overtake him between thoughts of his coming interrogation, he learns to open his eyes. His sense of sight comes all at once, lidless eyes in truth just waiting for their output to be registered, and what he sees first are the strangely reflective blue and silver surfaces of a space built from the same material from which Our Benefactors had first manufactured the ships that would take their colonial body to Earth. He's in a bunker, a high security complex, The Citadel, possibly even the part of it that had originally been a vessel of interstellar and interdimensional exploration. The sight of this chamber built from that alien alloy (and inhabited by terminals and assembly machines that are only slightly modified from The Government's days as an exploratory research expedition and yet whose manufacturing models he still doesn't recognise) can provide no clearer an explanation than that of where he is, but it spells out for him instantly that where he's found himself is worse than where he'd first thought.

He thinks to look down at himself, he sees a familiar (but not familiar enough) reactive armor system cloaking his body, and it doesn't yet occur to him to think of what has really happened to him. What occurs to him without thinking now, though, is that underneath that armor system something has gone horribly wrong.

He reaches for one hand with another - where most of his body is sealed beneath alternating layers of graphene meshing immersed within a non-Newtonian gel solution, that seal breaks just above his wrists to give way to what could have been the gloves on an Old World military's battle dress uniform. He reaches to pull one of those gloves off, despite the terror welling up within him for what he'll find underneath. Not his hand, but something only slightly resembling it; a construction of a transparent, alien compound (the new form of plastics introduced by the Earth's new government) enmeshing a wrinkled sac of cerebrospinal fluid, blood and saline in which floats only a rough approximation of the circuitry of a human hand. 

Electromechanical implants probe at the free-floating mixture even as he watches; even as the pressure that they put on the sac's outer lining with each twitch of his "muscles" fills him with fear for what would happen were that lining to be punctured by them in doing so.

But he recognises the plastic hand. He'd been the one to rubber-stamp its design as an example of "colonially-guided human invention." An R&D algorithm had taken the blueprints for a robotic analogue to the form of an alien species from another colonial planet, had repurposed them into blueprints for a robotic analogue to the human body, and then it had been Laszlo's job to pass those blueprints off as having been devised by man. Seeing the way they've been brought to life prompts him to attempt to scream, and in that way he discovers that his voicebox, if it exists, is something that he doesn't have access to.

He can step forward, though - he pushes himself forward as though doubling over to vomit, and in doing so his hand that is still hidden by a combat glove finds itself brought up to tear off the combined helmet and CBRN mask that covers his head. It rolls across the metal of the floor, and he freezes to feel his neck being made of the same compounds as those that make up what have replaced his hands. Although he had already figured out what he was going to find in that act, the reminder of it now is still enough to send his "head" despairingly in search of the cradle of his "hands". A plastic finger presses in against a crevasse in his plastic neck and the implants within report to his nerves underneath that what that finger is touching then is just another portion of the sac of nerves and spinal fluid waiting to be found from underneath every inch of the plastic surface of his body. Waiting to be pierced. Waiting for the totality of his being to slip out and spill from inside. Or waiting for their coating of saline to be spent, and for his nervous system to begin to rot from the inside out.

They did it. They actually did it. The Gestalt of the last checkpoint he'd passed through (was it really the last checkpoint he'd passed through?) had done more than flag him for review; it had performed that review itself, then had passed the review along to be printed in duplicate somewhere else. Teleported off into another, foreign body to the one he had known.

It was fear-mongering, FUD conspiracy theory that Earth's authorities had merely been waiting to implement mass-scale human brain scanning in secret; to reap human souls to secretive ends. What purpose would such an act even serve? It would allow human beings to be rescued from death, their consciousnesses saved away at the very moment when they'd have thought to have been lost forever, without any worry to be had for the otherwise insurmountable nightmare of optics that would come from your colonial government having pushed onto an indigenous population a technology that defies utterly the context of their civilisation.

Then those human beings could be planted into bodies with natural lifespans measured in hours. Shock troops outfitted with the Earth Overwatch's standard issue of scavenged Old World military gear mixed with the repurposed left-overs of a civilisation whose only limit to their technology is their trust in their constituents' ability to resist its misuse. But to what end? For what possible reason?

What will Laszlo do? Other than die, that is? Was there anything he would have ever done other than die? He would gasp for breath, hyperventilate; wake in a cold sweat from this nightmare. Maybe he will once again awaken somewhere else, hours or minutes from now once his mind has finished necrotising away, or once his brainstem has slipped out of place in its latex skin to be crushed between an interlocked pair of plastic joints, and when there might then be nothing holding him from being whisked away again to some other place, _any_ other place, where he _can_ be free to gasp for breath, to hyperventilate; to die again at least from inside a more familiar form of body. 

He can't help but note - that idea of a free-floating consciousness finding its own way elsewhere was one that he'd never found very persuasive as he'd had it suggested to him by others, but as his thoughts lead him through his own more esoteric ideas now what he's found is something that comes to suggest exactly that to him from within his own experiences, hopes and hypotheses.

It's only then that he notices:

A tissue extrusion machine standing behind him, a biomechanical tendril extending out from it into a port at the base of his neck and a broad window above him that stares out into an expanse whose sight he still isn't prepared for.

He's not on Earth. He sees a planet from orbit and for a moment thinks it must be Earth, centuries or even just decades ahead from the time he knows, but then what reaches up through the roiling storms that have now engulfed this world is a structure too dissimilar to The Citadel for this planet to be the world he knows. From inside an abyss that reaches deep within the planet's poisoned, dying rock, a multi-pronged umbilical elevator extends upward to hold his prison in a geostationary orbit. Waste spacetime is vented through the umbilical, arcing down into the rift in the planet at the same time that it radiates out across the planet's skies to tinge its collapsing atmosphere with the golden-green, Xenium glow of free-floating, universal possibility. 

In one moment of sheer horror that comes to him at the sight of it (a moment that he can only hope to have been the product of delirium; of an early necrotisation of the cortical areas that would see his ideas linked together meaningfully), it all clicks. Memories from a life an unknown number of years and lightyears away flood back through him, remote ideas riding on a wave of terror:

"Dust theory". Hofstadter's conception of consciousness as a pattern in the networks of information that underlie a physical reality. The concept, attributed to Tesla, of a highest level of reality through which all of spacetime is connected and from which consciousness (and all energy with it) flows. Borges's dream of a future in which every man will be capable of all ideas. Nick Land's (and Ken Kesey's) nightmares of an alien noumenon manifesting itself through our engines of cognition and civilisation which we can only realise too late are actually its own. The holy grail of all technology, conceived in the nineteen-hundreds, blueprinted in Earth's new colonial era of the two-thousands and now finally brought to life in a still unknown era after that.

Lost in those thoughts, what Laszlo notices next brings him a still-unexpected form of relief.

What he first thinks to be the rest of the bodies that orbit this planet's star, each of them wreathed in debris weaving their own complicated, intersecting orbits, in fact are Universal Union combat fleets that now close in around his captors' orbital platform; many thousands of vessels nesting around planet-sized Dark Energy accumulators and arrayed against the platform's occupants like the thousandfold defense mechanisms of a human immune system. Will they act in time? Laszlo has only his hope that they will - and only his ignorance of just how close the machinery building to crescendo from all around him really is to the immanentisation of its final goal: The barrier between this reality and the underlying source of its every constituent concept, pierced through with a spear of Xenium many billions of years in the making (this universe has been the Demiurge's project to arm a relativistic missile of Aeonic debris) to let the totality of all things spill out from beyond - and then what?

A voice rings out from inside his discarded helmet - the distant descendant of a Silicon Valley speech synthesis engine, jury-rigged into the language functions of an alien AI framework that had become the foundation for a military coordination and command system somewhere between the Earth and one of the black hole homeworlds of the higher civilisation that would save mankind, and all other beings with them, from a lonely end on their dying planet; in their dying realities.

"Attention, testing unit, internal communication systems report unresponsive. Performance monitoring reports unlikely prospects for further combat capability. Termination will proceed in five... four... three... two... one."

Laszlo wakes.

This time the neural implants connecting him to the Overwatch coordination and command network have hooked themselves in successfully to the alien grub that has been resculpted roughly into the shape of his nervous system, and his neural template is accepted for use among those that would defend the last bastion of what had once been the colonial government of a now long-forgotten, dead world.


End file.
